Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Vietnam: When Tank Combat Failed Against Guerilla Warfare | Greatest Tank Battles | War Stories" video.

@fredcollins8919 Rubber exports made French Indochina a money machine. Rubber was as exportable as oil. After WWII synthetic rubber was in massive supply -- even over-supply. This CRUSHED the economics of natural rubber plantations -- for both the British (Malaya) and the French. In 1940, Malay was the source of 40% of Britain's export income! Yup. Like tea, the end-users were addicted to rubber. Their pricing was so high that H.Ford launched a massive rubber plantation in Brazil to break the Franco-Anglo Duopoly. His outlays were so epic that films have been crafted showing the craziness of it. BTW, he was not the only one 'going Brazilian.' As to why Paris didn't figure out that the game was up? Lord only knows. Rubber prices had crashed. Today natural rubber is still needed. It is so expensive that its market is limited.
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@fredcollins8919 Peru is the 'Saudi Arabia' of hydro-potential. If properly exploited, Peru would be one of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Peru could entirely power the Green Economy. Yes, there is THAT much rain and snow hitting the Eastern Andes. It gets there courtesy of the Amazonian jungle, nee solar collector. We don't need solar cells. We need hydro-electric dams on the Andes. The problem is that it's going to take an international coalition to exploit Mother Nature.
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Westmoreland has his faults BUT: he's the father of air-mobile warfare. He had an outstanding track record during WWII and on up. His over-riding blindness was that European tactics and strategy simply did not apply in Vietnam. He also had a weird belief in the US Army replacing the locals in a Civil War with outside sponsorship. That was simply idiotic. Nixon was RIGHT. We had to hand the fight back to those who lived there. Nixon IMMEDIATELY reversed course from Democrats Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon still remembered Ike's advice from his VP days. (And Ike was still around to give advice in 1969.) [All presidents talk to former presidents, something acknowledged when Nixon died. Ford, Carter, Bush and Clinton attended his funeral service.] You can see that Westy had his brain stuck on Europe -- and the USSR. You also cannot leave the Army Chief of Staff, Earle Wheeler, from blame. He was Westy's sponsor in their mutual follies. It took Abrams to give M-16s to the Vietnamese. Denying such rifles to the Vietnamese Army has to rank as the supreme folly of the entire war. An M-14 is too heavy for Vietnamese soldiers -- and the NVA was spraying them with AK-47s. Good grief was Westy wrong.
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His tanks were being used as instant pillboxes -- not as tanks in mobile warfare.
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@fredcollins8919 In the grand scheme of things we need: Mass produced hydro-electric dams. These don't figure to be Hoover dam, but something smaller, rather much like a Swiss dam -- low-flow and high-head. We need to build them as cheaply as possible -- to a standard design -- like cars or Liberty ships. I'm leaning towards a mono-pole generator design that promptly electrolyzes rainfall into hydrogen and oxygen. This drastically removes complications. Monopole generators generate massive amps at low voltages. NASA uses them to create mega-arcs to test heat shields. NIB magnets simplify mono-pole generator even further. Each dam and power-plant can run without co-ordination, too. Again, to simplify. The product oxygen could be tapped for this or that chemical industry -- but the primary goal is export of hydrogen -- as a pressurized gas -- in the manner of natural gas. One can easily imagine huge industries being established in Chile, Peru, Brazil -- everywhere. Mexico already uses hydrogen to convert iron ore to iron sponge -- thence off to an electric furnace to craft steel. The process is price competitive even now. Brazil has a HUGE iron oxide deposit that is serving the world. With piped in hydrogen, Brazil could up-grade to iron sponge, and almost all down stream products. Such plants would be located near the mine -- not in the jungle -- obviously. Because of the Amazon river, HUGE alumina reduction plants could be sited in its deeper waters. Combined, these plants would make Brazil a world scale industrial power. With such wealth, Brazil could pipe -- up hill -- all the water she needs for Sao Paulo -- where everyone wants to live. Right now Sao Paulo is as thirsty as Cape Town.
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The irony: his Pentagon Papers made him infamous -- but they ONLY described the Kennedy-Johnson years in Vietnam. But, in the public mind, the PP indicted Nixon -- who was reversing essentially EVERY ONE of Kennedy-Johnson's policies. Isn't that cute?
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@loschekell Absurd statistic alert. BTW, it takes TWO to tango. Without Ho's aggression, the Northern invasion of the South would've never happened. BTW, the North and the South had ALWAYS been two different polities. Both were centered around their own river systems. This is still true, as it's Saigon that's getting all of the Foreign Direct Investment... typically occupying old MACV bases. The North and the South STILL don't really 'get-along.' The South resents the fact that the North controls all of the top slots -- politically -- in what is still a Communist//Socialist regime. Vietnam is very much like a mini-Red China in most respects. Considering the DNA involved, that's not really surprising. At the end of the day, Nixon got the USA OUT. Kennedy-Johnson got the USA in -- big time. I mention Kennedy because he set the stage. Johnson largely did what he did BECAUSE of ORAL commitments that Kennedy had already made to Japan, Korea, Taiwan -- and NATO. Kennedy had already delivered BIG: Bay of Pigs Berlin Wall & full on Iron Curtain Cuban Missile fiasco Every single critical American ally was freaking out -- for it was obvious that the Grand Strategy of the Cold War was breaking down: Containment of Communist Totalitarianism. Nixon reversed everything by triangulating the USSR and Red China in 1972. If Nixon had been president in 1961-1965, Kennedy would've stayed alive, and none of his fiascos would've transpired. Lastly, while in office, Kennedy was CONSTANTLY being grilled by the Press and critics over his epic gaffs. How could ANYONE overlook the Berlin Wall, his baby? It took Reagan to get rid of that Wall.
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@JB-yb4wn I know. He launched the EPA, the Enforcement Division for Employment Equality and shut down the Vietnam War -- American-style. For all practical purposes he launched the Green movement as a viable political axis. It was his funding -- via the NSF -- that got Freon out of the atmosphere. The Montreal Convention took years to arrive, even al Gore became involved -- at the end -- tail of the dog - politically. Ever since al Gore has striven to repeat his Senatorial days. In 1995, the Nobel Committee split the glory across three scientists. The actual originating scientist was Rowland. Moline was his student. (You would not know that from the citation. It makes it seem like they were on opposite coasts of the US. What the committee did not know -- because Rowland 'forgot' was that yours truly shoved the project -- to wit: Freon -- down his throat in the mid-seventies. I was the butterfly that started the entire series of events. I never imagined that science would be so warped by al Gore -- his crusade against universal plant fertilizer. Another funny fact: I predicted Watergate in my final English term paper -- in the Spring of 1971. My instructor submitted it to The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Naturally, it was never published. It proved to be uncanny. And yes, I never voted for Nixon: obviously super-involved in the cover-up. by the time late 1972 came around.
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No. KENNEDY got America in the soup. LBJ is on TAPE lamenting that he didn't know how to back away from Kennedy's global commitments.
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